Une vie trop belle: Bugs and a Night Bazaar

Today has been a trying day for me, bug-wise. I'm trying to figure out how to toughen up mentally against all the interesting creatures I encounter here. We found some crazy-looking spiders all over our dorm exterior today. They're gray, white, and orange. There were 5 or so large ones and then a bunch of babies all over. Last night when I walked into the bathroom area, there were so many bizarre insects. A ginormous moth was sitting on the floor, geckos on the walls, and some humongous flying things that look like hornets with an extra long, super stretched abdomen. We also found out that the millipedes that make our dorm their stomping grounds are poisonous. The spiders that hang out all over the dorm walls are apparently called Ornamental Tree Trunk Spiders. Ornamental? Pretty sure those are the last kind of ornaments I'd ever want. Anywhere.
Alright, enough about bugs. Breakfast was fine--rice for 3 meals gets a bit old, but Peru and Bolivia got me prepped. We even have spicey food for breakfast here. It's a bit too spicey for my liking, but maybe I'll get used to it. That, or my taste buds will all die.
Today we didn't have any teaching, so we helped with outdoor work for awhile. We cleaned up inside one of the houses they're building on site. Then we did more resource creation in the volunteer office. That gets kinda old, but we got to listen to music and all that. Then we did some planning. Hoi. I hated that lol. But we got things better figured out for tomorrow's teaching.
We also had a meeting about the homestay we'll be doing next week. We leave Tuesday morning to Jalae Village where we'll stay until Saturday. Saturday is the elephant ride. Our homestay will be interesting. Bucket showers, squat toilets, bamboo floors. We'll be helping fix the roof of a church that was damaged last year during rainy season. There are a lot of things to remember there, culture-wise. The hill tribes that we'll be around will be the Lahu and Akha tribes.
More resource development after lunch. I did my laundry, too. Their washer is really strange. It's a basin that doesn't close. It fills up with water and swirls your clothes around for 12 minutes. You drain the water, then you put it into another compartment that spins it for a few minutes. It's nice to have clean clothes :)
Dinner was good--we had yummy spring rolls. There was definitely super spicey stuff as well. I ended up feeding that to the dogs. They like it, even when it's incredibly spicey. The cat eats anything, too. Then Nella, Steph, Pear, and I decided to go into town. We got a songtao and went to the night bazaar in Chiang Rai. It was cool--they had a lot of really beautiful things there. The handicrafts here are incredibly beautiful. So colorful and so very cheap. We've all gotten too accustomed to paying in baht, so things that would be dirt cheap in dollars sound expensive in baht. Really amazing pants go for about 190 baht which is like $5.50, but we get to feeling it's expensive lol. I looked up the average annual income here in Thailand--$4000. Makes you feel awful. There are children begging on the street. We're not supposed to give to them because it encourages the parents to use their children for that purpose. It's so sad though.